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loud. When the meal was served, a procedure normally attended by complete silence, he would joke with the maids, which was something my mother found hard to endure. It won’t be long, he once said, not in the least inhibited by the presence of the maids, before there’s nobody to serve you. Then you’ll suddenly come alive. There’s a whiff of revolution in the air. I’ve got a hunch that something’s coming that’ll liven everything up again. Hearing such remarks, my father would shake his head and my mother would stare fixedly into my uncle’s face, as though she had no qualms about showing her dislike for him. In Mediterranean countries everything’s quite different, he said, but he did not elaborate. I was seventeen or eighteen at the time and wanted to know in what way things in the Mediterranean countries differed from things in Central Europe; he said he would explain it to me one day when I visited these countries myself. Life in the Mediterranean countries is a hundred times more rewarding than here, he said. I wasnaturally eager to know why. Central Europeans behave like puppets, not like human beings, he said. They’re all tense, they don’t move naturally, everything about them is stiff and ultimately ridiculous. And unendurable. Like the language they speak, which is the most unendurable language. German is quite unendurable. I was thrilled when he talked about
the Mediterranean countries
. It’s a shock to come back here, he said. It did not worry him in the least that his remarks spoiled the appetites of his audience. And what atrocious food! he exclaimed. In Germany and Austria, and even in German-speaking Switzerland, it’s not food, it’s just junk! The much vaunted Austrian cuisine is just a joke, an insult to the stomach and the whole of the body. When I’m back in Cannes it takes me weeks to recover from Austrian cooking. And what’s a country with no sea? he exclaimed, without pursuing the idea. After taking a mouthful of wine he would wrinkle up his nose. I could see that he even disapproved of Austrian mineral waters, which are generally well thought of, but he made no comment on them. He must be infinitely bored at Wolfsegg, I thought at the time, for he never had the chance to take part in a lively conversation, which was what he always enjoyed most. Sometimes, at least early on in one of his visits, he would try to initiate one, for instance by throwing the name Goethe into the arena, more or less apropos of nothing, but they did not know what to do with it, let alone with names like Voltaire, Pascal, or Sartre. Being unable to keep up with him, they contented themselves with disliking him, and their dislike intensified from day to day until in the end it turned to overt hatred. They were always intimating that while they worked hard, he had apparently made idleness, and the cultivation of idleness, into the daily content of his life, into a lifelong ideal. You know, he once told me, I come to Wolfsegg not to see the family but to see the house and the landscape, which bring back my childhood. Then, after a pause, he said, And to see you. In his will he left instructions that he was to be buried not at Wolfsegg, as the family expected, but in Cannes. He wished to be buried by the sea. Dressed in somewhat pompous and utterly provincial outfits, my parents rushed to his funeral expecting to inherit an immense fortune, only to be confronted, as I have already indicated, by what my mother called
the greatest disappointment of our lives
, which was all they had to take home with them. The good Jean, the son of a poor Marseillefisherman, inherited stock to the value of twenty-four million schillings and real estate worth at least twice as much. Uncle Georg left his art collection to the museums in Cannes and Nice. His gravestone, erected by the good Jean, was to bear only his name, followed by the words:
who left the barbarians behind him at the right moment
. Jean adhered strictly to Uncle